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K’09 – Contemporary Cyrillics

The ParaType type foundry from Russia celebrated the three-hundred-year anniversary of the type reform by Peter the Great by organising an international modern Cyrillic competition entitled K’09. From 234 submitted typefaces from 13 countries, the jury selected 23 projects that received awards. Six further prizes were awarded by the ParaType type foundry.

The jury members were Vladimir Yefimov of ParaType as the head of the jury, Yuri Gordon, Alexander Konoplev, Artemy Lebedev, Vladimir Muzychenko, Tagir Safayev and Maxim Zhukov.

In the past few years, the Cyrillic fonts have experienced an overall boom, and not only in countries where Cyrillic alphabet is actually used for writing. As one may see when looking at the award list, several awarded works originate in the USA, Greece, Germany, and two in the Czech Republic. The awarded works also reveal that present-day Cyrillic fonts don’t evolve much. With a very few exceptions, innovation is rare, and font designers pretty much only apply certain modern Latin style trends to the Cyrillic script. This is perfectly fine, as Cyrillic does deserve its own good quality newspaper, magazine and display fonts. It does, however, make judging rather difficult, because the fonts may only be evaluated on the basis of proportions, homogenous style, or technical details, and not for being innovative.

Neacademia

In Latin script, the urge to experiment and develop the shapes of letters has been strong throughout the 20th century. Yet, for Russian designers, any deviation from the existing canon is taboo. From the whole collection, only a single font DR_Krokodila by Dmitry Rastvortsev of Ukraine offers contextual alternates for the Bulgarian variation of Cyrillic, and only a handful of the awarded works contain alternatives for Serbian Cyrillic. When judging Bulgarian Cyrillic, Russians seem unable to give up their irrational, nationalistic perception of the script, and all Bulgarian innovations are treated with deep contempt. Yet, where else should we find space for innovation and experiment than in an international competition? Maybe experiments were submitted, but they were simply disqualified. The only true experiment in the whole collection was thus the Moyenage typeface by František Štorm, a contemporary take on the blackletter heritage boldly applied to Cyrillic as well.